The report of KDE e.V. for the fourth quarter of 2011 has been published. It gives an overview of the activities KDE e.V. supported in the last 3 months of last year. The report has a message from the President of the Board reflecting on the first 15 years of KDE and looking forward to more opportunities. There are stories about exciting product announcements and the various sprints that produced exceptional results.

Read the full report (PDF).

After about nine months of extensive development, the KDevelop team is happy to announce the immediate availability of KDevelop 4.3. As usual, this feature release comes packed with new features, bug fixes and improved performance.

Video editing has evolved from a niche market in the computer world to something that computers are simply expected to do. It's a tall order to be everything to everyone. But if any video editing software comes close to that mark, it's Kdenlive—a KDE Applications star. With a strong commitment and a plan for making major improvements, the Kdenlive team is raising money. Please help out if you can.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest:

• Work on diagram auto layout feature in Umbrello
• 'Create new class' dialog for Ruby support in KDevelop
• Work on object custom dimensions tabs and support for Matlab's .mat format in Kst
• KStars gains a horizontal coordinates grid

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest:

• KDevelop gets sessions data engine and plasmoid, also memory usage optimization and various fixes
• In Calligra, fixes for mouse events; Kexi switched to a new optimized SQLite database compacting tool; multiple bugfixes
• Implemented ResourceWatcher signals for added and removed types in Nepomuk

We are glad to announce that KDE has been accepted as a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code for the 8^th time. We look forward to working with great students throughout the summer again.

Plasma Active Three sprint - (top left to bottom right): Aleix Pol,
Martin Gräßlin, Marco Martin, Martin Klapetek, Martin Brook,
Sebastian Kügler, Laszlo Papp, Alex Fiestas, Dario Freddi,
Maurice de la Ferte
Not shown: Cornelius Schumacher, Fania Bremmer, Seif Lotfy,
Thomas Pfeiffer. (click for larger)

Last week, a group of Plasma Active hackers and designers met in basysKom's office in Darmstadt. The officially dubbed "Plasma Active Three Sprint" had as its goals to plan the next release of KDE's device-spectrum user experience, define work needed to accomplish this release, design user interfaces for new features and enhancements, and of course get cracking. Another point of focus was to work on a few things that need to be done before the launch of the SPARK, the first consumer device featuring a fully free and openly developed software stack, running KDE software.

Today KDE released updates for its Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform. These updates are the first in a series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.8 series. 4.8.1 updates bring many bugfixes and translation updates on top of the latest edition in the 4.8 series and are recommended updates for everyone running 4.8.0 or earlier versions. As the release only contains bugfixes and translation updates, it will be a safe and pleasant update for everyone. KDE’s software is already translated into more than 55 languages, with more to come. The March updates contain many performance improvements and bugfixes for applications using the Nepomuk semantic framework.

Akademy—the annual world summit of the KDE Community—will take place from 30 June to 6 July in Tallinn, Estonia. 10 years of Akademy; 15 years of KDE!

The 2011 Members' Choice Awards from LinuxQuestions.org has honored the KDE Community with "Best Desktop Environment of the Year". In addition, Tech Radar has declared that KDE Workspaces are the best desktop environment. KDE innovation, performance and stability have particular appeal for users.